Today, approximately three hundred and fifty thousand Americans die each year due to cardiac arrest. Eighty percent of these fatalities are due heart arrhythmia caused by ventricular fibrillation. Typically, ventricular fibrillation is treated by using a defibrillator to apply an electric shock to a patient's heart.
Three kinds of defibrillators are used by emergency medical personnel for applying a defibrillating shock to a patient suffering from cardiac arrest. These are: (1) manual defibrillators which charge and deliver shocks to patients solely in response to the user's request; (2) automatic defibrillators which charge and deliver shocks to patients solely in response to ECG data collected from the patient and analyzed by the defibrillator; and (3) semiautomatic defibrillators which analyze a patient's ECG data to advise on the delivery of shocks, but await shock delivery requests from their users before delivering defibrillating shocks.
Prior art defibrillators are quite complex and cumbersome. Consequently, in the past, defibrillators have usually been used only by emergency medical personnel with considerable training. Moreover, prior art defibrillators typically produce very low survival rates, because often quite a bit of time elapses before a trained medical operator (needed for applying the defibrillating shock) reaches the victim of cardiac arrest to apply a defibrillating shock. This poor response time greatly reduces the utility of the defibrillating shock since the chances of surviving a cardiac arrest exponentially decrease with time elapsed after the arrest.
Thus, in order to increase the utility of defibrillators, and thereby increase the number of lives saved, the defibrillator deployment time needs to be reduced. The defibrillator deployment time can be reduced by designing a defibrillator that can be used by non-medical personnel (such as police officers, fire fighters, teachers, supervisors, or common lay people) who can quickly reach victims of cardiac arrests in order to apply defibrillating shocks.
Such a defibrillator, that can be used by non-medical personnel, has to be light-weight and portable, so that it can be quickly carried to a victim of cardiac arrest. Moreover, the operation of this type of defibrillator has to be simple so that an inexperienced operator could easily use it to apply a defibrillating shock, even if the operator uses the equipment infrequently. Several such simple and portable defibrillators are disclosed in: U.S. patent application entitled "Defibrillator With Self-Test Features," filed on May 10, 1994, and having the Ser. No. 08/240,272; and U.S. patent application entitled "Electrotherapy Method and Apparatus," filed on Apr. 4, 1994, and having the Ser. No. 08/227,553. The disclosures of these patent applications are incorporated herein by reference.
One manner of simplifying the operation of a defibrillator (so as to allow a non-medical operator to easily use it) is to simplify the act of connecting an electrode pad cable to the defibrillator. A typical defibrillator has (1) an energy source that provides the motive power source for delivering a defibrillating shock; (2) an electrode connector that is housed in the defibrillator and that mates to the electrode connector of the electrode pad cable; and (3) a controller for actuating the defibrillator to deliver a defibrillation shock from the defibrillation energy source to the patient via the mated electrode connectors and electrode pads.
Non-medical personnel, who do not frequently operate defibrillators, may experience difficulties in connecting prior art electrode pad cables to prior art defibrillators, because these defibrillators do not provide sufficient guidance for rapidly establishing such connections. Consequently, there is a need in the art for a defibrillator connector apparatus that provides guidance for connecting the defibrillator connectors.
Moreover, the design of this defibrillator connector apparatus should minimize the effect of environmental residue on the operation of this apparatus. Environmental residue is material (such as blood, vomit, dirt, water, etc.) that exists in the environment in which the defibrillator is operated. While in storage or in standby mode, the connector apparatus of a defibrillator might accumulate residue, which would threaten the electrical or mechanical integrity of the connection during an emergency.
Alternatively, during actual use, residue may be unavoidably introduced into the connector apparatus, which would thereby result in the loss of precious time as the connectors would have to be cleaned or replaced. Consequently, there is a need in the art for a connector apparatus that enables residue to be easily and quickly removed from it during emergency and routine maintenance operations of the defibrillator. Ideally, the connector apparatus should clean itself when the connectors mate. In sum, there is a need in the art for a defibrillator connector apparatus that can be easily operated by non-medical personnel under all environmental conditions.